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Until 75 years ago, White House “ghosts” – those journalists, historians and playwrights who worked as presidential speechwriters – toiled in anonymity. Who besides professors and “Jeopardy!” contestants could tell you that, before he became president himself, James Monroe wrote for George Washington, even crafting a farewell address when he considered retiring at the end of his first term?

Increasingly, though, these phrasemakers become celebrities themselves. There’s Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, which included his high-profile speechwriters such as Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood and Judge Samuel Rosenman. And, of course, people like JFK’s Dick Goodwin, Ronald Reagan’s Peggy Noonan and Jimmy Carter’s Hendrik Hertzberg, who have prominent post-White House careers as authors and commentators.

Robert Schlesinger – whose father, Arthur, the noted historian and onetime New York Post columnist, served as in-house chronicler of the Kennedy administration – tells us about both types in his new volume, which will delight history buffs and political junkies alike.

We learn that Richard Nixon generally did not like full, prepared texts; he preferred “suggested remarks” that allowed him to extemporize – though not without careful preparation (“planned-libbing,” his staff called it).

Lyndon Johnson was rarely satisfied with the efforts of his speechwriting staff; on one occasion, the president yelled: “I get the best minds in Washington together and what do they come up with? Vomit – 50 pages of vomit.”

Schlesinger analyzes the process that produced some of history’s most famous presidential speeches and explains how they evolved; we learn who wrote what in JFK’s inaugural address, LBJ’s “we shall overcome” speech and FDR’s Pearl Harbor message.

Interestingly, though, it turns out that many of these speeches’ most memorable lines were composed not by the writers, but the presidents themselves: FDR’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and “a date which will live in infamy”; JFK’s “ask not” (though borrowed from earlier sources) and Reagan’s “tear down this wall” – all originated with the men who spoke them.

Which begs the question: Who deserves the ultimate credit for presidential addresses?

Ted Sorenson, Kennedy’s devoted amanuensis, probably put it best when he explained why JFK should be considered the author of all his speeches – no matter who actually wrote the words. “If a man in high office speaks words which convey his principles and policies and ideas,” he told Schlesinger, “and he’s willing to stand behind them and take whatever blame, or therefore credit, that goes with them, it’s his.”